Posts tagged ‘Walmart’

About 35-40 activists braved the cold on Thanksgiving evening at the Walmart on the corner of Butterfield Rd. and Kirk Rd. in Aurora, IL. Thanks to the Northern Illinois Light Brigade (NILB), we had beautiful, lighted signs that shoppers and ongoing traffic could see. The signs read, “Living Wage Now!” and “Fight for $15” You can check out some of the photos that will eventually be loaded to the NILB Facebook page.

The action was peaceful and our really cool lighted signs earned a number of honks from holiday travelers. There was a bit of controversy when we approached the Walmart store. A number of security guards attempted to stop us from taking up a spot in front of the store and told us that “we had to leave now or they would call the police.” We stayed for 3-5 minutes and chanted, “Low Pay is not OK” and “hey-hey, ho-ho, the poverty wages have to go!”

It is Thanksgiving and I can’t get over the conversation I had with Chris Lauzen last week over the topic of a living wage ordinance. Even though I was born and raised on the mission field in West Africa, I don’t think that a politician’s faith should matter, unless that politician makes it part of his or her campaign. Chris Lauzen has put his faith front and center in most of his political endeavors – his political views as one who professes very publicly to be Roman Catholic are fair game. And, if you read the press release linked above you will notice that Lauzen doesn’t mind criticizing the Pope when the Pope admonishes Republicans. Maybe Chris is more in tune with God than the Pope is?

This morning I read a recent speech by Pope Francis who condemned the idolatry of cash in capitalism and called for a society with people, not money, at its heart. “It is the consequence of a global choice, an economic system which leads to this tragedy; an economic system which has at its center an idol called money.”

It made me think that the phone conversation Chris and I had should be made public and I should let readers decide if they think Lauzen is a man of faith or another hypocrite.

Wal-Mart workers have launched historic labor protests and strikes across 28 stores in 12 states, the first retail worker strike in the company’s 50-year history. According to organizers, employees are protesting company attempts to “silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job.” We go to Bentonville, Arkansas, to speak with Mike Compton, a Wal-Mart worker protesting outside the company headquarters today just days after taking part in a successful strike at a Wal-Mart supply warehouse in Elwood, Illinois. We’re also joined by Josh Eidelson, a contributing writer for Salon and In These Times who broke the story of the Wal-Mart store strikes last week.

Members from several groups came together on October 5th at the Elgin, Illinois Walmart to show their support for striking Walmart workers at Walmart’s largest distribution center at Elwood, near Joliet,Illinois.

The strike is now over but I wanted to submit this to show what the strikers went through. They are heroes.

On Friday, Oct 1, I protested with the Walmart warehouse workers in Elwood, Illinois. I am with Jobs with Justice of Northern Illinois and we were there to show support for workers who are in just such a position and need some moral support

to show they are not alone in their fight. Other unions also backed the strikers.

It was a typical rally with an off site location across from the gigantic warehouse where the contents of trailers are unloaded into the facility and are re-loaded for distribution to local Walmart stores. Several of the speakers were “strikers” who walked off the job after trying to deliver a grievance petition to their management and were ignored and fired from their jobs. They told of inhuman working conditions where the temperatures inside the trailers parked outside in the sun reach up to 130 degrees on summer days.